on the seven o’clock flight.
She scans a list on a clipboard. “Will you be bringing luggage?”
“Just me.”
She wields a pen. “And you are?”
“Katja Drdova.” I hand over my crisp passport as evidence.
The ticket costs more koronas than I expect, but I count out the money without argument, nodding when she explains that I’ll have to also purchase a visa in the Istanbul airport. My skin is beginning to tingle. The exhaustion affects my bones, or it feels that way, as if dirt has wedged its way into my joints. And my senses are becoming acute-an ill woman behind me breathes with the intensity of a tractor engine.
Ticket in hand, I cross the bright tile floor to a small corridor past the pay phones to the bathrooms. I splash water on my face and look in the mirror, prodding the corners of my eyes with a fingertip.
Old.
But I’m only twenty-four.
Given the heavy lids and shallow creases across my brow, it’s an understandable mistake.
I consider calling Aron from one of those pay phones. He’ll return to an empty house tonight, and, though it won’t be so strange, after a while he’ll worry. He doesn’t deserve that. But what could I tell him? That I’m going to Turkey unexpectedly? That’s not something people just do. People just don’t do this.
My hands tremble when I show my ticket to the uniformed border guard, but he doesn’t seem to notice. At the gate, I ask a fat man with a little red star on his lapel for a cigarette. He smiles glassily as he lights it for me; then I feel him following me with his eyes as I find a seat by the window and smoke, staring at the planes taxiing on the tarmac.
This, I recall, is where Libarid was. Maybe this exact spot.
When the news came a week ago, I was on the telephone with Aron, who had called from the factory to continue our previous night’s argument about having children-he’s never been able to understand my refusal. Chief Brod opened his office door and leaned against the frame. In my ear, Aron was saying, “I’ve been patient with you; you know this. You can’t say I haven’t been patient.”
Chief Brod is a simple man who wears his emotions on his sleeve, and when he stood in his doorway with his gray-threaded blond hair parted perfectly, like a schoolboy’s, in his face I knew this was something big; it was something tragic.
“Let me call you back,” I told Aron.
“This is original, cutting me off in the middle of-”
But I’d hung up, and Imre and I followed Emil into his office.
“It’s Libarid,” our chief said.
“He’s in Istanbul,” I said. “Right?”
“Bulgaria.”
I grinned- grinned. “What’s he doing there?”
“Yeah,” said Imre. “He got a girlfriend there?”
Emil cleared his throat. “Brano called from Istanbul.”
Both Imre and I made faces at that name.
“Libarid’s dead,” Emil told us, then filled in the details-Armenian terrorists, an explosion-and I found myself repeating Armenia, Armenians in my head but making no sense of those words.
Aron and I had dined with Libarid and his family now and then. He was a good man-a poor investigator but a decent person-and an Armenian. His wife, Zara, smiled a lot; she seemed content in a way I used to think was a little stupid. But she served wonderful food, delicious pieces of lamb with yogurt they called kalajosh and lahmajoon, a lamb-topped pizza. When we left Aron would always mention how contented Libarid seemed with his wife and child. I think he was jealous.
And then Libarid was dead, part of a fireball in the Bulgarian sky.
That was only a week ago. Now I’m joining the other passengers in a crowd around the dark stewardess who does her best to smile as she tries to force everyone into a straight line. It’s plainly impossible, so she gives up and takes ticket stubs from whoever offers first and sends us out the door, across the hot tarmac to the plane. The fat man with the red star is a few people ahead, and as we step out under the bright, bewildering sun I watch him put on sunglasses. His head, tilted to the side, eyes covered, looks vaguely mysterious.
That’s when I wish I could have brought my gun.
Peter
1968
In the morning, Peter and Josef conferred with friends in the empty dormitory canteen. School had been closed indefinitely, but Jan had a key. Peter retold his story humbly-the nighttime fire, the Russian jeep, then running-and they nodded, all confirming his stupidity.
“But why didn’t you stick with Toman and Ivana?” asked Gustav, an older, bearded student from the medical school. “Maybe you would’ve gotten away, too.”
“The soldiers were my fault. I’d started the fire. So I had to lead them away from the others.”
That earned him a collective nod of respect.
He took a tram into the old town with Jan, and on the way Jan pointed out pockmarked walls-on a cinema, a bakery, a post office. They were in the back of the crowded tram, whispering. “Josef and I were at the radio station, the morning after you left. Radio Prague asked people to come, so we came. Lots of us came.” He smiled. “And of course the Russians came, too. It was a terrible fight, took hours. A few times I thought we’d actually make them turn around and leave, but then…” He shrugged. “Well, they got through to the station.”
“How did you get away?”
“The Russians are stupid. They’ve got no idea how to work the back streets.”
“But they’ve won.”
“Fight’s not over yet,” Jan said as they got out. He touched his brow. “I’ll see you tonight at the meeting.”
“What meeting?”
“Didn’t Josef tell you? The engineering students are coming, too. Eight o’clock, at the Church of Our Lady of the Snows.”
“Right. Of course.”
“The priest has a soft spot for us.” He winked. “Time to figure out our Plan B.”
Peter wandered the town, fists in the pockets of his thin pinstriped jacket, ignoring the forms passing him. He stumbled now and then on concrete broken by the treads of Russian tanks. He had nowhere to be, but at least he wasn’t in that old dormitory, surrounded by those students and their proud tales.
What he’d gone through in that field outside eske Bud jovice, terrible as it had been, was over in a matter of minutes. These students had been plotting and fighting for a week now, and for them it was just the beginning. A sense of valor kept them going. Unlike Jan, Peter had no residual pride to warm himself with.
He considered returning to the Torpedo, just in case that soldier was there to distract him for a while, but in Republic Square he heard a voice.
“Peter Husak.”
He turned. In that first second he felt nothing. Then his fingers grew cold and began to fidget in his jacket. Captain Poborsky’s bald head glowed in the gray light.
“Now don’t tell me you’ve forgotten me already.”
“Of-of course not.”
“Can I buy you a coffee?”
“Well, I have to-”
“I insist, Comrade Husak.”
The StB officer guided him back to the massive Obecni Dum, the Municipal House. Under the art nouveau
